


Bloody, But Unbowed

by shadedScribe



Series: Sword and Sorcerystuck [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternia functions more like a normal society in this one, Angst, Character Study, Fantastic Racism, Gen, Karkat-centric, Slick is less stab-dad and more cool stab-uncle, That mostly just makes it worse for everyone, featuring a joke stolen from Futurama and run into the ground, like seriously heavy fantastic racism, this one's kind of heavy ngl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:39:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22470418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadedScribe/pseuds/shadedScribe
Summary: Of Karkat Vantas, the society that wanted him dead, and a few people who didn't.
Relationships: Kanaya Maryam & Karkat Vantas, Spades Slick & Karkat Vantas
Series: Sword and Sorcerystuck [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1607413
Comments: 1
Kudos: 29





	1. Mind the Bloodstains

**Author's Note:**

> This is another one in that fantasy AU based on Pathfinder. I'll be honest, this one grew like kudzu as soon as I started setting words to page. But anyways, here's the first half of Karkat backstory, which will eventually tie into some connected fics about the rest of the trolls. The second part of this one should be up soonish, though I might do a few more oneshots in between. Mind the tags, this one's kind of darker. 
> 
> Also, I should note that some backstories and dynamics are a little different for this AU, since here, Alternia functions a bit more like a regular (albeit super fucked-up) society, and thus a lot of people aren't as isolated as they were in the original canon.

Karkat Vantas was six years old when he first learned that he was an abomination.

It was in the stupid classes that Alternia herded all of its lowbloods into for the first few years of their development, just long enough to make sure that they could read and write and rithmatic enough so as not to inconvenience anyone when they got assigned to things, before turning them out to fend for themselves. Today, Karkat and the other random kids in class were learning about the caste system. It was nothing new, just the same things drilled into your head whenever you walked down the street. Humans, orcs, goblins, kobolds, and so on: bad. Dwarves, catfolk, assorted others that the highbloods found a bit more useful or entertaining: not quite so bad. Lizardfolk, dragonborn, other appealingly not-squishy-mammal-looking types: Ok. Elves and the other long-lived, graceful types: Good. Landdwellers, the cousins to the seadwellers: Great. The seadwellers themselves: Super Great. The fuschia-blooded ones at the head of the seadwellers: Ultimate Great. Simple. If you forget it, someone will whack it back into you quick enough.

Today, they were getting into a few extra wrinkles, though, like how merfolk and sahuagin and other undersea types were uppity deviants who had to be exterminated so that the seas could be owned by their true rulers, or the rules for tieflings, which basically boiled down to whether or not the highbloods thought your particular strain of fiendish taint was cool or not. Karkat wasn’t too invested in the lesson. He wasn’t sure about his exact blend of heritage, since he’d been plucked out of a back alley and dropped off in an orphanage, one of many collecting the living refuse of the streets so they could keep just enough of it alive to fuel Alternia’s endless imperial endeavour. He looked, well, basically human? But with some weird features, like sharper teeth, and those abortive ridges at the base of his neck. Some people thought he looked like he had some orc in him or something. Whatever it was, he knew his place: You’re Bad. Do what the highbloods say, and you’ll live a bit longer.

Karkat’s thoughts were suddenly broken up when Mister Tumurs, the elf teaching their class, flourished his stick in his ‘I’ll hit you if you don’t pay attention” sort of manner.

“Listen up! This next part is important!”

Karkat listened; that stick was heavy. Mister Tumurs broke people’s fingers on a weekly basis.

“Now, there’s one other type of being, the very worst type of all. Be sure to remember it, and tell someone if you see one so they can kill it.”

The hell? What was left, they’d already gone over every race, right?

“This being,” Tumurs continued, “is the mutant. Our seadwellers and their landdweller cousins are the greatest races in the world, Because of this, jealous people have tried to corrupt them and make them weaker to deny them their rightful place. The result of this is the mutant. Mutants usually look to be mostly human, but sometimes they have strange features if you look closely enough. Unfortunately, you’ll have to keep a close eye out, since the only truly reliable way to spot a mutant is their freakish red blood.”

“R-red blood?” asked a confused little goblin girl in the front row.

“Yes, I said red blood!” Tumurs caught her with a vicious crack in the ear. He hated interruptions. “Are you deaf or just not listening? What did I say?”

“Red blood, sir!” said the girl, trying to choke down tears. Tumurs hated crying.

Before the poor girl could get any more whacks, Karkat raised a hand. You could usually get away with asking a question if you were deferential enough and it wasn’t too stupid.

“Mister Tumurs, sir?”

“Yes, what is it, Kurcut?” Tumurs was also bad at remembering names.

“If humans and orcs and so on all have red blood, sir, how can we tell the difference when we need to spot a mutant, sir?”

“I’m glad you asked, Kurcut.” He turned away from the girl to address them properly. “While it is true that other races have red blood, mutant blood is different. It’s not just red or even a bright red. It’s a neon red, so red it even glows a little. An ugly red, completely unlike anything that you could normally see in nature. Take a look!”

Tumurs reached under his desk and brandished a set of color cards. One was a darker red, like old blood, the next was the lighter red of fresh blood, and the third…

Karkat felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. That third color looked kind of familiar.

“Though this freakish red blood is the only certain way to spot a mutant, sometimes they do have other oddities, parodies of the higher races that they make a mockery of. Flaps where there ought to be fins, or bumps where there ought to be gills. But the blood is the key! What is the blood?”

“The key.” they all dutifully replied.

Tumurs paused for a moment.

“Now remember, children, that mutants aren’t like the rest of us. Their sick blood poisons their brains and makes them think wrong things. They hate Alternia; not just the highbloods, but everyone in it. They’ll spend their whole lives waiting for the chance to hurt even just one person they way you would wait for a piece of candy. Even if you’re a complete nobody, a mutant will happily kill you just so Alternia will have one less soldier. They lie as easy as breathing, and they steal anything they can get their hands on. You can never trust them. They’re abominations, and the only way to keep you safe from them is to kill them as soon as you see them. If you ever happen to see a mutant, run and get the nearest soldier you can find to take care of it. Everyone got that?”

“Yes sir!”

“Good. We’ll talk more about this subject later. Dismissed.”

The class filed out of the room in an orderly fashion. Karkat listened to them chattering around him with excited terror about what they thought mutants might like to do to people, and his sinking feeling went straight to the seabed.

Later that night, back in his tiny room at the run-down orphanage, when he was absolutely, positively sure he was alone, Karkat pried a sharp splinter from the wall, haltingly pricked open the tip of his finger, and looked to see what came out. Even under the moonlight, there was no mistaking it.

Neon, vibrant, glowing, mutant red.

\----------------

Things changed, after that. Karkat stopped going outside to play; even a little skinned knee could be the end of him. People made fun of him for wearing long sleeves and pants in all kinds of weather, but he just learned to ignore them. And to be more careful with his clothes; replacements were hard to come by in the slums that lowbloods like him lived in. Lots of things were hard to come by, actually.

As their classes with Mister Tumurs continued, they got more details about mutants and their ways, along with the other education in the racial hierarchy. Apparently mutants had been whipped up by magic users from Alternia’s enemies, sent to try and infiltrate the country and degrade the blood of its leaders. But seadwellers were too special and perfect to be imitated like that, so mutants wound up just being sleeper agents and stuff, getting messages from the enemy in order to carry sinister plans against the empire.

Of course, Karkat had never heard so much as a whisper from anyone outside of Alternia in his life, but he could hardly try and explain that to anyone now, could he? Mutants really were the boogeymen for Alternia, huh? At least the mean stuff they said about some of the other lowbloods was sort of true; they did tend to be poor and fight and steal and die a lot. (Whether that was just something they did or if it was because they were all stuck in slums was something Karkat had been wondering about more since he’d had to deal with this mutant stuff.)

But nobody else had Karkat’s perspective on things, of course. It didn’t help that mutants showed up as villains in what seemed like almost every play, book, and story that they ever saw, whether in their lessons, in the occasional traveling shows, or in the rare salvage from the junk heaps everywhere. The sinister assassin that sliced people up for fun before losing the climactic duel with the seadweller heroine in the third act? Mutant. The sniveling masked man who stole innocent highblood children to sell to foreigners, before overreaching and snatching a seadweller boy who rallied the plucky highbloods to humiliate him and his minions in wacky hijinks, culminating in his unceremonious execution by the Legislacerators at the end? Mutant. The devil-worshipping cultists who sacrificed babies to summon the spirits of of horrific monsters for the band of attractive young highblood heroes to fight? Oh, you better believe they were led by mutants. Even the antagonists in the romance novels wound up being secret mutants half of the time.

With all of that getting rammed into everyone’s heads, even some of the people who hated Alternia also hated mutants. ‘Don’t we have enough problems?’, they’d say, or they’d list bringing mutants down on them through their endless warring as one of the bad things Alternia was responsible for. And there was no way to try and talk anyone out of it, either; saying anything that sounded sympathetic to mutants got you some real suspicious looks from people, if you were lucky. And to top it all off, Alternia had a reward on their heads, and a lot of people were desperate enough to not have many scruples left.

Karkat was eight years old the first time he saw another mutant get executed. He was walking back from another stupid lesson, sticking to the side of the street and not making eye contact with anyone, when someone ran by at top speed, knocking into Karkat and getting something sticky on him. Before Karkat could yell at the guy or clean it off or do anything else, he saw it and froze. Mutant blood. There was a shout from behind the runner, and Karkat flattened himself against the wall just in time to avoid a squad of soldiers in hot pursuit. One of the soldiers threw a spear that caught the fleeing mutant in the knee. As he fell, Karkat got a good look at him; a boy in the clothes of a dock laborer, who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, a slash on his arm from some careless accident. He looked kind of like an older version of Karkat.

The soldiers had gathered around the fallen boy, kicking and taunting. Some of the shopkeepers in the nearby stalls had joined in the yelling too.

“Dirty thief!”

“Give it to him!”

“Let’s see you steal from me now!”

The boy’s desperate pleas were mostly drowned out by the shouting. Everyone who wasn’t participating in the violence had either turned away or kept walking. Karkat wanted to do something, but. But.

What the hell was he supposed to do?

The soldiers’ squad leader, a lanky lizardfolk, sauntered up.

“Alright, what’s the ruckus, lads?” he asked, before seeing the downed boy and rolling his eyes. 

“Oh, just kill him already.”

One of his men obliged with a spear to the throat. The furor died down, and the squad went back to their old posts, leaving the body for the cleaners and bantering happily about the reward they were going to get for taking down a mutant. Karkat stood staring for a moment more before one of the shopkeepers nudged him in the shoulder.

“Hey,” the woman said, pointing to the bloodstain on Karkat from where he’d been bumped into, and holding out a rag. “You’d better get that cleaned up. Wouldn’t want anyone to think you’re a mutant, eh?”

“Ha ha, yeah, right.” Karkat forced a smile and took the rag, and scrubbed off every last trace before running home, and trying and failing not to cry.

The next day, as he went to lesson, there was nothing left of the dead boy but a faint bloodstain. Karkat gritted his teeth and walked on.

\-----------------

When Karkat was ten, their orphanage lost its headmaster, who was the only staff member. This was not an unusual occurrence, mind you. Poor old Crabdad (Karkat hated that he had been too young to remember the man’s real name) had been the nicest person he had ever known, and had really cared about the kids. And, like a lot of nice and caring people who lived in Alternia, he had died young, a month after Karkat turned five. Since then, they’d had about twenty headmasters, who fell to various combinations of disease, violence, and addiction, or managed to get a better job. No, what made this time unusual was that after about a week it was becoming clear that they weren’t going to get another one.

It wasn’t unheard of. Her Imperious Condescension was big on survival of the fittest, and consequently more than a few offices and agencies and even the occasional military unit learned that they had been deemed redundant by virtue of their supplies, funding, or personnel just not showing up anymore. Karkat had guessed that they were getting downsized a day or two ago, actually. But now everyone else was catching on too, and it was chaos. The noise finally got to the point where Karkat had to go and see what the hell was going on. He came down the stairs into the common area, and was greeted with madness. Some kids were fighting over how to ration out what was left of the food, others were trying to crack open the office safe, a few were arguing over who should get the headmaster’s old room, and so on. The place, which already looked like it had been built with nothing but the leftovers from other construction projects (because it had been) and hadn’t had any repairs in years (because it hadn’t) was somehow even more of a mess, with debris everywhere. Interspersed throughout the crowd there were siblings clutching at each other, and dotted around the room, there were the littler kids, crying or looking scared.

This wasn’t going to do, was it? Karkat looked around for a useful object; one of the old headmaster’s empty whiskey bottles caught his eye. Perfect. He picked it up, yelled “HEY!” at the top of his lungs, and shattered the bottle on the banister.

The room quieted as a hundred kids turned to look at him.

“We’re not going to get anywhere if we keep going on like this. None of us have families and the highbloods decided to cut us loose. If we’re going to survive, we’re going to have to work together. Unless you’d rather try your luck out on the street?”

Nobody responded to that one.

“So let’s take a look, figure out what we’ve got left, and figure out what we’re going to do. If we just fight over it like a bunch of animals, we’ll all get picked off before long.”

Murmurs of assent filled the room, and a few of the kids that had been at the heads of the arguing groups came over to him as he made his way down towards the kitchen, stuffing his hands in his pockets in case he’d cut himself on that bottle (real smart move there, Vantas). The tall orc girl with the dog that she somehow managed to keep, who had been trying to stop people from raiding the food too much, was at the front. 

“It’s Karkat, right?” she asked.

“Yes.” What was her name again?

She seemed to notice his hesitation. “I’m Skylla. Thanks for the help.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Did you have to get that glass everywhere, though?” an apron-wearing hobgoblin girl (Marsti was her name, Karkat thought) asked sullenly. 

“Well, there wasn’t anything else handy, so yes, I did actually.”

“Whatever, then.” She wandered over to sweep it up before anyone could step on it.

“So,” said Skylla, “I reckon we got enough food for about five days, or ten if we go to half rations.”

“Anything in that safe?” Karkat asked.

“Give us a minute,” said one of the kids trying to open it. “It’s hard to hear the clicks in this lock.”

“Here, step aside.” said Skylla, picking up a board. She took a few solid whacks at the lock; the board splintered everywhere (Karkat could hear Marsti sigh in the background), but the cheap lock was shattered too. They looked inside the safe; there was about a hundred caegars, enough for a few more days worth of food, if they were careful.

“Well, we’re not gonna starve right away, but it’ll run out quick.” said Skylla. “Any suggestions?”

“Wait, what’s this?” Karkat reached behind the money and pulled out some paperwork. Requisition forms, such as could be delivered to any of the local offices of the empire and fulfilled, as long as you had the right stamp and signature. And wouldn’t you know it, their late headmaster had pre-signed and stamped them for convenience. It didn’t look like they were that hard to fill out.

“Well, that’s convenient.” said Skylla.

“Is it allowed for us to put those in ourselves?” someone asked, uncertainly.

“Can we afford to care at this point?” Karkat answered. It almost certainly wasn’t allowed, but the imperial bureaucracy in the cities was a mess. They should probably be more worried about the depots not having the stuff they needed than being found out.

“Well, that’s food taken care of.” said Skylla cheerfully. “What about safety? Eventually it’ll get out that this place ain’t officially backed anymore, and people’ll start showing up for the looting.”

“We’ll take turns.” said Karkat. “We can evacuate the first floor at night, and set up some kind of guard rotation. Can we make some kind of, I don’t know, spears or clubs or something?”

“No problem.”

“Right. We’ll guard the windows and the stairs, and take it in shifts. We can set up shifts for cooking and stuff too.”

Karkat looked about the room; it was around here somewhere, wasn’t it? There it was; the rickety old blackboard. He dragged it out into the center of the room and started drawing grids.

“Alright people, who’s gonna volunteer?” Karkat asked as he wrote his own name down for the night guard rotation. 

“I reckon I can do some cooking,” said Skylla, “and put me down for some guarding too.”

“I guess if it’s got to get done.” said Marsti, still sweeping. Nobody else budged.

“Anybody?” Karkat asked. Still nothing. A vein pulsed in his temple. “Damn it, people, how are we supposed to make it if no one is going to step up and help! It’s going to take all of us together if we want to keep living, instead of starving to death or getting enslaved or murdered! Now come on!”

Slowly but surely, people started raising their hands or coming up to write their names. As Karkat’s shift charts filled up, he felt a bit of hope. Maybe they could pull through.

\-------------

The first time Karkat killed someone, he was ten and a half.

It had been about six months since they’d had to start running the orphanage themselves. All things considered, it was actually going pretty well. The imperial bureaucracy took their unauthorized requisition forms without so much as a blip of trouble. Even when the shipments got picked up by kids, it didn’t raise any eyebrows; apparently a lot of headmasters were lazy enough to make their charges do it. Getting the shipments home through streets filled with desperate and violent people was another matter, but they managed: Skylla was big for her age (thirteen, the oldest one in the orphanage) and a good fighter, and her dog, Lady, was a terror; Marsti had a surprisingly effective air of ‘I don’t care, try it, pal’; Karkat, well, Karkat was starting to get good at yelling. It took some effort, learning to stand firm in a street confrontation (the slightest cut…) but it had to be done. Overall, they usually managed to get their food shipments back mostly intact. 

Of course, even the intact ones weren’t exactly generous, but they made do. Most of the kids were in that little gap from about the age of nine, where the empire stopped caring if you showed up to the ‘mandatory’ lessons as long as you popped in every once in a while to make sure you hadn’t forgotten how to read and do math, to the age of twelve, when they made you start doing real work or training. As such, most of the kids had plenty of time to scrounge and panhandle and do odd jobs (and steal, if they were bold enough). The only one old enough to be conscripted into a real job was Skylla, who helped herd animals and threw her wages into the collective pot. There was a little goblin kid named Diemen who was surprisingly good at scrounging up piles of unused food that only made you a little sick when you ate them. Marsti cleaned, Karkat did every obb job he could, and between everyone’s efforts, none of them starved.

Karkat had wound up becoming something of the leader of their orphanage during all of this, somehow. You’d think it would be Skylla, but no, it was Karkat who proved to be the best at haranguing people into doing things, and planning things, and also he was the best at filling out the papers, and he had somehow gotten drafted into ‘telling stories to the littlest kids so they’ll shut up and get some sleep at night’ duty, which really made him important in their eyes. He was also the second-oldest, after Skylla, and he was getting real good at yelling.

So yeah, things were going about as well as they ever went in the lowblood slums. Kids still died sometimes, of course, cut down after being caught stealing or dragged away in an alley for gods knew what. But there was no getting away from that, in Alternia, when you weren’t a highblood.

No, the only particular problem they were having right now was keeping the place safe at night. There were always people who were desperate enough to turn to violence in the slums, and there were always monsters all over the city (the Condesce encouraged it, she thought it kept people sharp), but lately there had been a serious uptick in monster activity, and a subsequent increase in crime due to the chaos and stirred up feelings. Their orphanage hadn’t been attacked by any monsters, but there had been a few attempts by desperate looters, and more ominously, black-market slavers had been seen around recently, taking advantage of the lapses in security from the mess.

And so there Karkat was, at three in the morning, sitting by the base of the stairs, listening to the distant screams and chaos from the monsters, holding a scrounged-up knife and hoping nobody was going to try anything. Skylla was waiting by the front door, Lady at her side, and a few other of the older kids (none of them above the age of ten, of course) were waiting in various spots with makeshift weapons. They’d gotten a hold of as much sharp and noisy stuff as they could and scattered it around the inside all of the doors and windows, so at least they wouldn’t be taken by surprise, right?

The night almost seemed to bear down on him like a blanket lined with lead. At least he didn’t have much trouble seeing in the dark. Was that a mutant thing? Was he breathing too loudly, or was it just his imagination? Just a few more hours until dawn, then he could snatch a few hours’ sleep. Just stay awake for-

There was a clatter and a crunch as someone upset the debris by one of the windows, and everything went crazy. The first intruder caught Skylla’s punch under the jaw and dropped; his companions gave up on stealth and burst in. There were five more all told. One got dragged down by Lady, and the second was brawling with Skylla. The other three advanced on the rest of them. They were adults, but they clearly hadn’t been expecting any actual resistance; they were armed only with nets and ropes. Slavers, then. One of them was locked in an awkward dance with three kids armed with makeshift spears, trying to grab the weapons away without getting jabbed. Karkat didn’t see what the fourth one was up to because the fifth one was trying to wrap a rope around his neck. He pushed it away and swiped wildly with his knife; the adult easily dodged it, then grabbed both of Karkat’s wrists and pushed him back towards the wall, overpowering his feeble attempts to stand his ground. As they neared the window, they both slipped on debris and fell heavily to the ground, Karkat dropping his knife. The slaver apparently decided that Karkat was too much trouble to try and capture and began to strangle him, heavy hands crushing down on his throat. As he started to black out, Karkat flailed desperately. His blows flopped harmlessly off, but as he scrabbled around the floor, he felt something- the knife! His fingers closed on the hilt, and a hairsbreadth before the dark claimed him, he stabbed up with all his strength, again and again, until the hands at his throat were limp and a gruesome bath of warm blood flowed onto him.

The rest of the fight was over by the time Karkat managed to extricate himself from the corpse and stand up, with two of the slavers dragging their unconscious companion away. The other two were dead; Skylla had broken one’s nose hard enough to drive it into his brain, and the other had been savaged by Lady.

Skylla turned to look at him, eyes wide.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m,” Karkat coughed. His throat felt raw. “I’m alright. It’s not my blood.” He really hoped none of it was his blood, at least. Did mutant blood stand out enough to be seen at night?

Skylla nodded. “Stay alert, everyone. There might be more.” 

She turned back to her post, leaning down to help clean the blood off of Lady’s muzzle. Nobody else had any injuries worse than bruising. Karkat sat down heavily on the bottom step, trying to wring his clothes clean. He gave up after a minute or two of futile effort, and looked to the nearest window, trying to ignore the corpse of the man he had killed. (It was so, so, still.) Adrenaline and exhaustion warring within him, he looked out into the night and hoped that nothing else would happen.

For once, the universe did him a favor, and they made to dawn without any further incidents. Karkat fell into bed as if he were a tree felled by a lumberjack, wishing he could sleep forever. He couldn’t, of course; Diemen woke him at eleven in the morning so he could do the work they needed done if they didn’t want to starve.

He scrubbed out the bloodstains as best as he could before putting his still tainted clothes back on. He would have just thrown them away, but he didn’t exactly get a lot of new ones. At least the bloodstains wouldn’t stand out too much in the slums; if anything, they made people take you more seriously.

As Karkat stepped downstairs, he braced himself for the bodies, but they were already gone. Marsti was scrubbing at the stain where Karkat’s kill had been. She had helpfully stacked the dead slavers’ possessions in the kitchen before getting rid of them. He looked over it for anything useful; maybe they could use the nets for some fishing or something. 

Diemen looked up at him from where he was eating a sausage at the table.

“Are you ok? I heard last night was rough.”

“Well, I’m not dead.” Karkat shrugged. Sometimes that was all you got.

Diemen seemed to get that. “Alright then. Have a good one.”

Karkat nodded an acknowledgement and walked out to take care of the day’s tasks.

That night, there were more slavers, and Karkat hid to the side of a windowsill and slit a man’s throat as he climbed in. It was easier the second time.

\------------------

A few days later, Karkat was making his way back from work when he heard the screams start up around him. The proliferation of monster attacks in the city hadn’t let up lately, and he was exhausted, stressed, and starting to get really angry. Yelling almost came easier than talking, these days. But the world wasn’t about to let up just because he was miserable. He turned to see what the chaos was-

-and proceeded to be struck frozen with horror. Coming up the street was a swarm of the most hideous creatures Karkat had ever seen; hideous toothy maws on eyeless, tendril-studded bodies, with leathery wings and a stinging tail. They almost looked like a bat and a stingray had a kid, then that kid hooked up with the kid of a deformed shark and a squid. They were also coming right down the street, biting and stinging at passers-by. 

Karkat ran, but the streets were crowded, and he couldn’t move very fast in the panicky press. He looked back at the monsters; they were currently overwhelming a group of standard Alternian soldiers, ripping them to pieces. As Karkat watched, one managed to kill a soldier, then burrowed into her chest cavity, used its tendrils to turn her corpse into a puppet, and started murdering her comrades with her limbs. 

Alright then. Better run faster. Karkat slipped to the side and started climbing up to a rooftop. Just as he made it up, he heard a new sound being added to the cacophony of screams and chewing noises; organized, drill-sergeant type yells. Karkat looked back to see what was going on, and that was the first time he saw the Threshecutioners in action.

He had heard of them before, of course, just as one heard of every special Alternian military unit in the newspapers and speeches. But unlike the Cavalreapers or Subjugglators or Archeradicators or whoever, there wasn’t as much talk about their specific tactics or weapons in the stories. All Karkat knew was that they used sickles, and that a lot of stories featured some knotty military problem that was abruptly resolved when the Threshies came in. Apparently the city’s monster problem had finally gotten annoying enough for the Condesce to send in the real army. He leaned in to watch them, and was enthralled.

The Threshies had gotten in between the crowd and the monsters, and were tearing the awful things apart with perfect coordination and precision. Working in squads of four, they herded each monster away from the rest and cut it up. They even had a system; one of them would feint and bait a strike from the tail, which the second soldier would lop off. Both of the first two would attack, and as the creature beat its wings to get away, the other two would hook and shred said wings, and when the monster was helpless on the ground, it got butchered.

In less than a minute, the street was cleared, and the soldiers moved on to the cleanup. They were more egalitarian than most units, Karkat noticed as he watched them. No landdwellers or seadwellers, of course, but everyone else was in there. And their choice of officers seemed weirdly not beholden to the racial hierarchy; it wasn’t often you got to see a catfolk give an order to an elf. Was that why the propaganda was less specific about them?

The Threshecutioners finished making sure all of the enemies were dead, piled up the corpses, and set them on fire. A few of the officers, with an impeccably professional tone, gave some reassurances to the crowd, and then they were off, running with easy grace to whatever it was they had to take care of next.

Karkat had never considered what he might want to do in a year and a half when he had to take up some sort of serious vocation. (Honestly, he still wasn’t entirely sure he was going to live that long.) But now, having seen those soldiers calmly cut down the terror like it was nothing, and feeling the relief spreading around everywhere, he thought he might have an idea.

\------------------

Time went on. The rash of monster attacks had finally died down once the Threshecutioners and their colleagues got to work on it, and that made things way easier on everyone. Meanwhile, their little orphanage was almost starting to resemble a sort of autonomous collective. Their access to food was as good as it ever got in the lowblood slums, and they’d got used to defending themselves. Thanks to the recent chaos, they even had a decent supply of actual weapons. And the really wild thing was, the place actually ran a lot better than it had when there had been an actual headmaster and government backing. People actually defected from other orphanages to join up with them, which really went to show how little effort Alternia put into social projects, didn’t it? Karkat had been a little worried about providing for the newcomers at first, but it actually got easier with more people, because everyone had something to contribute. They’d even had to build an extension (holy fuck, an extension) to make room for some extra people; it was kind of shoddy, but so was the rest of the building, which meant it didn’t stand out too much. They did a lot more projects around the place nowadays, actually. Turns out, when things were run by people who were actually invested in them, they went a lot better. Who would have thought? They should have taken over years ago. (Why hadn’t Karkat thought of it sooner?)

Of course, it was all a lot more stressful for Karkat, who was still in charge of haranguing (though people tended to be a lot more cooperative these days), forging paperwork, organizing guard duties and other important tasks, and lately, peacekeeping, since everyone trusted him to be feeling equally irritable towards them and therefore fair. As the number of people they had to look after grew, so did the number of things that he had to take care of. But, well, as long as everyone was doing alright, he couldn’t complain. Actually, he could complain, but he was going to keep taking care of things anyway. His eleventh birthday came and went, and their little collective kept getting bigger.

Karkat was sitting at the desk in the old headmaster’s office, making a list of things they needed to try and get in their next illegally submitted requisition form, and trying to decide whether it was worth the risk to try and fake up some forms to get some medical supplies, since those forms were subject to more scrutiny than the basic ones. It was late in the evening of a nice late summer’s day, which meant they should maybe start stocking up for winter (thank gods the winters were mild in Alternia). He was just considering if maybe they should try and find some good sources of fruit when a polite knock at the front door made him jump and nearly give himself a paper cut. (He hurriedly checked to make sure there was no bleeding.)

The fuck? Who would knock at the door? No one who lived there would bother; most of them didn’t even use the front door anymore. Hell, half the time they didn’t even bother taking down the traps they set up around the thing at night. And of course, no Alternian official would bother knocking either, at least not in a lowblood part of the city. So who was it? Was it some sort of trap?

The knock repeated itself, equally polite the second time around. Skylla, who was making dinner, turned towards him and gestured questioningly towards the door.

“I’ll get it.” said Karkat. “Just keep an eye out.”

Skylla nodded and brandished the knife she had been using to chop vegetables, ready to throw it if necessary. Lady tensed a bit from where she was sitting by the counter. Karkat walked over and opened the door.

Standing outside was a lizardfolk girl with jade scales, carrying a pack and a sword that was a bit too big for her.

“Um. Hello?” said Karkat.

“Good evening.” said the girl. “I am sorry to intrude, but I have recently found myself compelled to live in this city, and I was wondering if you might have a space, seeing as I have heard good things about your group.”

The fuck? What on earth was she doing here? She was a lizardfolk, solidly midblood. She could get into an actual, properly run place. Did she just not know the city very well?

“You know, you could probably get in at some place midtown, it would be a lot safer than around here.” Karkat informed her.

“Ah, actually, I already tried over there,” she said, “but unfortunately they had already filled up their quota.”

“Quota?”

“A new imperial policy, specifically for lizardfolk. Might I please come in? I have some money, and I am an excellent sewer, and-”

“Alright, alright.” Karkat cut her off. “You don’t have to sell yourself, this is a shitty co-op orphanage, not a fucking Savant’s College or whatever the fuck. Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you.”

Karkat stepped aside to let her in and closed the door behind her. Skylla had gone back to chopping veggies, but was still watching with interest.

“Right.” said Karkat. “There should be a space on the second floor near the back. We’ll figure out a spot for you on the guard duty rotation once you’re settled in. Come on, I’ll show you around the place.”

Was there anything else. Oh, right, he should probably introduce himself. He held out a hand.

“By the way, I’m Karkat.”

The girl reached out and shook his hand. 

“My name is Kanaya. Pleased to meet you, Karkat.”

The handshake ended, and they went off to get her situated.

\--------------------

Kanaya Maryam (as her full name turned out to be) wound up being a pretty darn neat person to have around. She was indeed excellent at sewing, which was an invaluable skill in living conditions like theirs. She was also a pretty decent fighter, which was also an invaluable skill in living conditions like theirs. Having someone around who was a little higher up in the caste system helped smooth some things over when you had to deal with officials, too. 

But most importantly, Kanaya was a very collected person, who gave good advice and was good at getting people to calm down when they were upset. Karkat was still self aware enough to recognize that he in particular could use a lot of that. She was also just, like, a lovely person to have a conversation with; witty and engaging amd a good listener and good at questioning people and making them think without having to make them feel bad. She let Karkat bounce ideas off of her, offered smart criticisms, and let him know when he was starting to get ridiculous. In short, Kanaya was one of the best things that had ever happened to any of them.

Of course, she clearly had no experience whatsoever with living in the city, but having to, say, occasionally steer her away from the sketchier alleys, or hide from the guards with her because she wasn’t used to the idea of fruit trees not being owned by everyone, was an absolutely fucking miniscule price to pay for her company. Karkat in particular was very glad to have her around, because he was just getting busier and busier and needed all the help he could get. 

Shortly after Kanaya had arrived, another orphanage in the area had found itself cut loose just like theirs had been. (There were a lot of orphanages in the area; the Alternian capital was large and densely populated, and Alternia made a lot of orphans.) Once they’d realized, the new castaways had immediately sent a group over to the older ones to ask for help and advice. Karkat had obliged, of course. Originally, he had just been planning to show them how to fake up the simpler requisition forms and give them some advice on how to set up their security and chore rotations. But then, he had kept noticing other little things that could get fixed, and of course it was easier to move people and supplies safely when you worked together, and if you were doing that you may as well do all of the acquisitions together, and then of course you could get projects done more quickly if one group lent the other its spare workers, and you could move people around for convenience and loan each other supplies to cover gaps, and then someone had to coordinate all that, and the next thing you knew Karkat was doing the logistics for both places. He had used to think the bureaucrats he overheard complaining about paperwork were just being ridiculous, but now he was starting to get it. Of course, none of those guys had to also help with the night guard while also spending a bunch of time during the day doing other jobs to help take in enough money on top of their paperwork, so maybe they were still being ridiculous.

The point was, Karkat was very busy and very stressed, but what they had going on was working fairly well for everyone, so he wasn’t about to try and drop his workload. And now he had Kanaya to help keep him sane, so it was fine. Keep on keeping on, and all that. No problem.

\------------------

One day, when Karkat was around eleven and a half, Kanaya walked into the office while he was trying to figure out the best day for another joint construction project to fix the ominously creaking support beam in Orphanage A’s back wall. (Orphanage A was actually the second one; they had objected when Karkat had tried to label them Orphanage 2, so there was Orphanage 1 and Orphanage A.) 

“Excuse me.” she said politely. “I was wondering if I could ask you for a favor.”

“Absolutely.” Kanaya hardly ever asked for favors, so he wasn’t about to turn her down. Especially with how much she did to help everyone.

“I need to meet with someone over in the tanning district this evening to obtain a few things, and I could use someone to help me get it back here and watch my back for the trip. Would you mind?”

Well, that was a little odd? What did Kanaya need to get? But hey, it wasn’t far, and they could probably get back before dark.

“Sure.” he said. “Should we leave after dinner?”

“That will do, thank you.”

And so, later that evening, the two of them set out for the tanning district, Kanaya with her sword and Karkat with the makeshift sickle he had painstakingly made from an old broken hacksaw. They talked as they went, discussing a lizardfolk story (ok, romance novel) that Kanaya had recently showed him. Karkat really appreciated those stories; they could be kind of weird, but there was a distinct lack of mutant villains, which was a nice change of pace.

“I’m just saying, just because he’s interesting doesn’t mean he would make a good husband, and it’s not like it’s her job to fix him, you know?” Karkat was saying.

“While that is true, I think that there is something to be said for the experience of getting a fascinating person to open up to you and come to trust you. It might not always be the wisest thing, but it was still her decision after all.” Kanaya apparently thought a lot better of the heroine’s pursuit of the mysterious emotionally distant count than he did.

“I guess, but it’s probably not a very good decision. But hey, if she’s made her peace with it.”

The two of them arrived at the tanning district, and Karkat looked around the place.

“So,” he asked, “who are we looking for?”

Even as he said it, a big lizardfolk soldier leading a horse stepped up to them. Karkat froze and started looking around for escape routes. Was there something suspicious about them? He wasn’t somehow bleeding without having noticed it, right?

The soldier pulled two boxes off of the horse and set them down next to Kanaya before looking her over, concern in her face.

“How are you doing?” she asked Kanaya.

“As well as can be expected.” Kanaya answered.

The soldier nodded. “I’ll let them know. Stay safe.”

She mounted her horse and trotted off, the crowds parting in front of her. How had Kanaya known her? As the two of them picked up the boxes to carry back, Karkat asked.

“We do not know each other particularly well, but we were introduced when I was brought to the city, to make sure that I had someone to be in contact with for this sort of thing.” Kanaya answered.

“What’s in here, anyway?” Karkat wondered, gesturing towards the box he was carrying with his chin. “Smuggled goods or something?”

“No, nothing like that. Just a few things that they thought might be helpful.”

Seeing Karkat’s slightly puzzled look, Kanaya asked a question of her own.

“What did they teach you about the lizardfolk at your lessons?”

Karkat thought back. “Well, they’re midblood, they mostly live out in the swamps and stuff, they’re kind of primitive? I don’t know, that was most of it.”

Kanaya sighed. “I suppose that is to be expected. It is true that we do not tend to live in cities the way that the rest of you do, but that is because it suits us, not because we are incapable of it. But more importantly, we live in tribes.”

“Tribes?”

“Yes, tribes. Groups of people who share a common connection. We take it very seriously. Even though the tribes are far too large to even begin to know everyone personally, we know how to recognize each other, and a member of your tribe is like family, no matter where you find them.”

“So, was that soldier lady from your tribe?” That made sense to Karkat.

“Yes. Most of the lizardfolk in Alternia are from the same tribe, one that resided and still resides in part on one of the empire’s larger islands, conquered some hundred years ago.”

“Wait.” Karkat was confused. “If you guys are all a big family or whatever, how did you wind up here?”

“I was getting to that. You see, our sense of community has always been a problem for the empire. It wants to use us as soldiers, but since we don’t rely on civilization to live, it is not easy to exert power over us. The empress could just crush us entirely, of course, but that would mean not being able to exploit us. Do you see the problem the empire has here?”

Karkat nodded, and Kanaya continued.

“So, the imperial policy has been to try and destroy our sense of community. Pieces of our people have been relocated by force for some time. I am merely a victim of the latest efforts. Do you remember when we met, and I mentioned a quota?”

“Yeah,” said Karkat, “I thought it was weird, and you said it was an imperial policy just for lizardfolk.”

“Indeed. The empire has started forcing lizardfolk children such as myself to move away from our lands, and mix into general society. There are even quotas on the various dwelling places, to make sure there are not too many of us in one area. The empress wants to destroy our connections with each other and assimilate us into the empire properly, so she can finally have us entirely under her control. She has even made it illegal for other members of the tribe to give any help to the displaced children.”

“But we just got...” Karkat gestured to the box he was carrying again.

“Well, yes. It may not yet be the time to fight back openly, but that does not mean that we will simply roll over and accept it.” Kanaya smiled grimly. “We will not be broken, no matter what the Condesce does.”

Karkat paused for a moment to think about that while they walked. A few people saw them carrying goods and looked on with interest, but thought better of it after getting a better look at Kanaya and that nasty-looking sword she carried.

“Has it been hard?” Karkat asked. Gah. Stupid question. Of course it must have been hard!

“Well, yes.” Kanaya answered. “It has taken some getting used to. I was already an orphan, admittedly, but losing that sort of community was a very great shift.”

“Right.” Karkat just felt sad. As if there weren’t enough of them all adrift in the world, the Condesce had to go and throw more people over the side.

“Still,” Kanaya continued, “it has not been as bad as I had first feared. The city may still be somewhat unfamiliar to me, but our little collective reminds me of what I had back home. Being with a group of people who are all together and ready to help each other is something of a balm. I feel like I should thank you for some of that.”

Oh. Alright then.

They walked on in companionable silence for a little while longer, until they got back to the orphanage, having luckily made it back before it got dark enough outside to be properly dangerous. Karkat stopped Kanaya for a moment before they got inside.

“Listen,” he said, “if there’s ever anything I can do that would, I don’t know, help? Make you feel more at home? Or whatever, even if you just need someone to talk to.”

Kanaya smiled at him. “Thank you, Karkat. I will keep that in mind.”

The two of them went inside and unpacked the boxes; there was a bit of money, bolts of fabric, needles and thread, dried fruits, a couple of books, some other helpful odds and ends, and a letter that Kanaya immediately read over. She was smiling when she was done.

\---------------------

More months passed, and things carried on, until it was the eve of Karkat’s twelfth birthday. Now he had a choice to make.

At twelve (or whatever age was equivalent, for some of the other races), the Alternian Empire expected its subjects to start learning how to do something useful. Start military training, start an apprenticeship in some trade, start working whatever low-skill job you could get, start learning how to use magic if you were lucky enough to have an affinity for it or to have a connection to some clergy somewhere. Highbloods had a lot more options, of course, but Karkat still had a decision to make.

He didn’t have any aptitude for magic, of course, and as an orphan with absolutely no connections, it would be hard to get any sort of apprenticeship. So it was either low-skill labor or military training. Honestly, military training sounded more appealing. But that was stupid; he would be surrounded with weapons and aggressive people; with his blood, he would be at constant risk. It was safer to just work at the docks or something.

Wait, was it? Karkat remembered a boy a little older than him who had died in the street. Nowhere was safe when you were a mutant.

Karkat thought some more. He thought about the Threshecutioners he had seen, and how they had turned terror into relief when they had showed up to cut the monsters down. Karkat had been forced to fight to keep himself and others safe too. Could he be better at keeping everyone alive if he was stronger? He remembered nearly dying because he couldn’t fight well enough. Could he be safer if he learned? 

Karkat had asked Kanaya for her advice. (Kanaya herself was higher in the system and skilled enough to be an apprentice medic.) He hadn’t been able to mention the mutant thing, of course, but he laid out the rest of it. Kanaya had thought for a moment before answering him.

“I think that ultimately you have to decide where your path in life goes. If you are worried about being stronger, then it might be worth your while to learn fighting, but you might find more peace working elsewhere. It is up to you whether becoming more capable of fighting is worth it.”

Kanaya turned to go back to the apron she had been sewing for Marsti.

“But for what it is worth, Karkat, I think you could be good at either.”

The next morning, freshly twelve, Karkat turned up at one of the military schools nearby.

At least this way, if he wound up getting speared in the street like a dog, he could maybe get a bite or two in first.


	2. Bleeding Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TOOK ME LONG ENOUGH, DIDN'T IT?
> 
> In all seriousness, my apologies for the delay. I kept getting sidetracked, the country was overrun with plague, etc. Future installments will hopefully be at least a little more frequent. This chapter was originally going to have Karkat meeting the rest of the Beta trolls, but at the rate things were going that would have made the fic twice as long and not finished until next year, and I wound up coming to a good thematic stopping point, so I decided to roll with it. I do hope this chapter was worth the wait. Thanks for reading!

Alternia’s military academy had its pros and cons, Karkat soon found out. The biggest pros were that now he could carry around actual weapons (and get a hold of the things in the first place, too) without drawing any suspicion. The uniform made it safer to walk the streets, since the military hierarchy tended to be annoyed when people randomly killed their potential soldiers. As such, even a lowblood could go about (relatively) safely while wearing one, as long as they didn’t do anything stupid. Plus, he was actually learning about how to fight, and the exercise was starting to actually build up his strength. And, hey, it was something to do.

That about summed up the positives. The negatives tended to feel more prominent. You really got hierarchy rammed down your throat when you were there, for starters. The more high-blooded students got all of the attention and all of the best stuff, while the students like Karkat mostly just got brief commands yelled at them until they got it right, which could be a while, since no one ever deigned to explain anything to them properly. While they did let you pick some of the weapons you got (Karkat had gone for sickles, in the admittedly rather slim hope of maybe being able to join the Threshecutioners), only the highbloods got actual training with their favorites. Everyone else got drilled in basic spears and shields and were left to figure out any other weapons on their own time. The teachers were all tyrants who had everyone drilling and working until they could barely stand, and sometimes even longer. The older boys took out their frustrations on the younger ones, and the higher-caste ones took out their frustrations on the lower-caste ones, and Karkat was at the bottom of both hierarchies. He also had to be careful every second in case he slipped up and someone saw his blood color, which would result in instant execution.

In summary, life was nasty, brutish, and brimming with the potential to be short. But hey, what else was new?

Honestly, Karkat had been feeling pretty alright lately, or at least as alright as he ever got. For all the misery that came along with it, military school meant that his days had more purpose and activity and less looking for something useful to do and stewing in anxiety. Besides, the orphanages were still running well. Karkat was learning just enough in military school that he could pass on a few skills to the other kids who were responsible for security, which helped. Other skills were also starting to filter into their collective as more kids got old enough to start taking jobs. They had been able to set up some halfway decent food gardens lately, and they had managed to start some clandestine night fishing operations on the river; highly illegal, but the riverine police could be evaded if you were careful. There was more money coming in, too: Karkat got five caegars a week as a living allowance, which was a fair bit by slum standards, and other kids managed to add to the pot as well. They had even added a third abandoned orphanage to the group, Orphanage Alpha. (Nobody wanted to not be first in the naming order.) Of course, having to keep everything organized as well as attending military school meant that Karkat was averaging about five hours of sleep a night, but he was used to that.

Yes, things were looking up, relatively speaking. Karkat couldn’t wait to see what would go wrong next.

\------------------

Astonishingly, things didn’t start to really go bad for some time, until Karkat was thirteen and a half, and the monsters started having an uptick again.

It wasn’t as bad as last time, of course. Apparently the Condesce had decided that the entire city being overrun and law and order breaking down was a little too inconvenient for her tastes. That meant that there were enough soldiers and magic users on duty to put down outbreaks before they got out of hand, and that their little orphanage collective didn’t have to run off as many slavers this time around. But there was still an uptick in people being dragged off by beasts that came up through the sewers and the alleys, especially in the poorer slums.

For example, there was the little girl who was getting dragged off by some sort of giant goblin-faced wolf looking thing right next to the orphanage when Karkat got back from the military academy one day.

“We need some help out here!” Karkat yelled as he rushed in and slashed at the clawed paw tangled in the girl’s shirt. His blow should have severed it, but hitting the beast’s leg was like trying to cut a steel cable. He didn’t even manage to draw blood, but at least it made the thing drop the girl. Unfortunately, it also made the thing turn its attention to him instead. Its claws tangled in Karkat’s clothes, he barely managed to get one of his sickles in between himself and its snapping jaws, and the both of them went tumbling and grappling down the hole in the street that the monster had pulled itself out of in the first place.

Karkat quickly found himself on the floor with his back against a sewer wall, desperately struggling to fend the beast off. One sickle kept the thing’s teeth at bay, while he lashed out with the other one and buried it in the beast’s neck. This time he managed to draw blood, but not much; it was like trying to cut a sack full of half-dried cement. The monster’s claws raked down Karkat’s ribs, leaving vicious cuts. He couldn’t hold the thing off for much longer. It twitched its head aside to avoid Karkat’s cut at its eyes, and its claws rose for another blow. He could only wince and brace for the pain.

Kanaya suddenly dropped in from above and drove her sword into the monster’s back. The strike didn’t seem to hurt it much, but it drew its attention away from Karkat, who managed to scramble to his feet while Kanaya and the creature circled each other. Karkat stepped up to Kanaya’s side, and the two of them rushed at the beast with a flurry of strikes that made up for in franticness what they lacked in precision. 

The monster suddenly vanished and reappeared a few hundred feet down the tunnel before turning and running. Apparently killing the two of them wasn’t worth the trouble.

Karkat started to relax a little and caught his breath as his adrenaline faded. Then he remembered that he was currently oozing mutant blood in several places and his heart started hammering again (which probably didn’t help with the bleeding). He looked down at his wounds; they were currently covered enough by muck and dirt and what was left of his shirt that you couldn’t see what color the blood was, but that wouldn’t last.

“Are you alright?” Kanaya asked him.

“Fine!” he blurted out. “Go check on that girl who got grabbed earlier.” 

The two of them clambered out of the hole.

“Someone cover up that opening!” Karkat yelled at the various kids who had come to see what the commotion was. “With something heavy!”

As Kanaya checked on the girl and Marsti wrangled a few kids into dragging some big rocks over, Karkat rushed inside as quickly as he could without being suspicious, went to his room, and closed the door securely behind him. Then he took off his shirt and cleaned and examined his wounds. Honestly, they looked a lot worse than they were; the cuts were shallow, and the bleeding was steady but fairly slow. All he needed to do was scrounge up enough cloth to bandage them up before anyone could notice, and he would be fine.

There was a knock on the door.

“I find myself suspecting that you are not actually fine, you know.” said Kanaya.

“Go away!” Karkat yelled back.

“Honestly, Karkat, there’s no need to be embarrassed about being injured while rescuing someone from a hideous monster that was trying to kill you both. In fact, that is probably about the least embarrassing way one could possibly be injured.” 

She opened the door, and Karkat hastily snatched up his shirt and held it over the cuts.

“And nothing could possibly be more embarrassing than some of the things I’ve treated while apprenticing at the clinic.” Kanaya added, as she set down her medical kit and tried to get a look at his injuries.

“It’s nothing, you don’t need to worry about it!” Karkat insisted. Was his blood coming through the shirt? Had he gotten any on his hands?

Kanaya sighed. “The way you were moving after that fight says differently. Please, this doesn’t have to be difficult, but I’m not letting you just try and brush it off.”

“I told you, it’s fine!”

Kanaya sighed again, reached out, and pulled the shirt aside. Then she caught sight of the blood flowing from Karkat’s cuts.

“Oh.” she breathed.

There was a pause. Karkat looked around the room frantically. The window was behind him, and they were only on the second floor; he could try diving out, and if he got lucky he could pick himself up and steal some clothes before-

“My apologies, Karkat.” Kanaya said gently as she reached out and made sure the door was properly closed behind her. “I should have realized that there might be a reason you were reluctant to let me see those.”

Karkat just sat there and blinked for a second. “You’re not going to…” He trailed off, uncertain.

“I’m not going to tell anyone.” said Kanaya. “Or do anything else. You are my friend. This doesn’t change that.” She smiled at him a little. “Now will you please let me stitch those up?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

“This will hurt.” Kanaya warned as she readied her needle.

“Oh, how bad could it- ow!” Karkat gritted his teeth against the pain. Fortunately, Kanaya was an expert, and her hands were sure and steady, so the cuts were neatly stitched up in short order.

“Thanks.” said Karkat.

“You’re welcome.” said Kanaya.

Karkat hesitated for a second. “You really don’t care about, you know...?”

Kanaya shrugged. “I have heard what people say about mutants before, of course, but back home, the tribe wasn’t really bothered about them, so I reserved judgement for if I ever met one. Having met you, it is quite clear to me now that what Alternia says about you is all lies.” She shook her head ruefully. “And here I thought you were always dodging stitches because you didn’t like needles.”

Karkat made a sound that was almost a laugh. “Yeah, that’s probably the impression people get, huh?”

Kanaya looked thoughtful for a second. “You know, I have some spare needles and thread. I can teach you how to do it yourself, if you would like.”

“Really? Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.” Kanaya smiled. “And if there is ever anything I can do to help, or you just need someone to talk to, you know where to find me.”

“I do.” Karkat agreed.

They sat in friendly silence for a moment, then Kanaya stuffed Karkat’s torn shirt and a spool of thread into his hands.

“Learning time.” she said cheerfully.

The next morning, Karkat set off for the military academy with sore ribs, basic sewing skills, and a bit of a good feeling about his life. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to deal with any monster attacks today.

There was another one of the wolf monster thingies going after some of his fellow students a few blocks away, because the universe had a terrible sense of humor. Karkat groaned; the kids it was going after were all snotty, upper-class elves, but he should probably do something anyway, especially since they didn’t seem to have noticed they were in danger yet.

“Heads up!” he yelled, drawing his sickles and running towards them. The three elf kids turned as the beast rushed at them, and one swung out with a lance-

-which tore deep into the monster’s chest in a spray of blood and sent it reeling away, yelping in pain. The second elf kid slashed the creature’s side open with a fancy sword, and the third narrowly missed caving its skull in with a mace before the monster decided it was outmatched and did its vanishing trick.

Karkat came to a halt a few feet away, astonished.

“Aww, look at the little lowblood.” taunted the kid with the lance. “All scared of a little old barghest.” He waved the bloody tip of his weapon teasingly in Karkat’s face.

“Now, now.” said the kid with the sword. “A barghest can be pretty threatening to little guys like him.”

“Besides,” said the kid with the mace, “it was sneaking up on us a bit. Good observation skills, Sickles.”

“Um, thanks.” Karkat half-mumbled.

The three elf kids turned away and kept walking to the academy. Karkat lingered for a second, shaking his head. Apparently his efforts at school hadn’t been teaching him as much as he had thought, considering that he had barely been able to scratch the barghest (apparently that was what they were called). Well, moping about it wouldn’t fix things. He would just have to try harder. And with that in mind, he hurried off for another day of training.

\-----------------

Life went on, and, as usual, more problems came up. The main one that was on Karkat’s mind as he walked home from training a few days after his fourteenth birthday was a lack of medical supplies.

Barghests, as well as other monsters, were regularly attacking people in the city’s poorer sections. On top of that, lately there were more monsters that carried disease and poison with them, as well as disease outbreaks of the more old-fashioned kind. This meant that a lot of the kids in their little orphanage collective (should he still call it little now that there were four of them after Orphanage Prime had joined up?) were getting sick and/or injured. 

The injuries they could handle; Kanaya had learned enough about how to fix them in her healer’s apprenticeship, and had also managed to train up a few assistants, including Karkat and Marsti. They had plenty of cloth and thread and needle for stitches and bandages, and some of the craftier kids had managed to get some mobility aids together too.

No, it was the poisons and diseases that were the problem. The potions and salves needed to cure those were carefully rationed out for military use, and unlike lesser requisitions like food and basic building materials, they had follow-up check-ins on their use that their orphanage collective could never pass even if they did manage to forge the documents properly. Which meant that there were entire rooms full of sick and dying kids, and they couldn’t really do much to help.

Karkat had been attending a whole lot more deathbeds than he liked lately, helpless to do anything for the poor people gasping out their last breaths while he and Kanaya struggled in vain to keep their hearts beating. Three kids had died in the last week, and it would have been more if Kanaya hadn’t risked her life to steal medical supplies from her work. And now Karkat had to think of some way to get more before she felt the need to try it again and maybe got caught.

The annoying thing was, they actually had a fair bit of money on hand, since they had the collective income of four orphanages worth of people working and begging and scrounging, and they didn’t have to pay for food much nowadays between the gardens and the illegal fishing scheme. But the supplies they needed couldn’t be bought through normal channels, and they were having a hard time finding a reliable black market supplier.

It was a knotty problem, and it was taking up pretty much all of Karkat’s brainpower thinking about it as he walked back home, which was probably why he was careless enough to let himself get stabbed.

It was really an expert stab, some part of him distantly reflected. Right between the ribs, just deep enough to really get the point across without actually injuring him too severely. Of course, that reflection came in a distant third, behind ‘ow!’ and ‘oh gods oh fuck I’m bleeding.’

“Nothing personal, kid.” said the guy with the knife, a lean half-orc with dark clothes and a fancy hat (were those filed teeth? for fuck’s sake). “But I’m gonna need you to hand over all of your magic weapons and valuables, nice and easy, alright?”

Karkat processed that for a second, then laughed mirthlessly (and immediately regretted it, since it jostled the knife).

“Magic weapons? Do I look like I own any fucking magic weapons?”

“There’s supposed to be little soldiers in training coming back from the academy with fancy magic and pockets full of allowance money.” growled the half-orc.

“Highblood ones, sure.” Karkat shot back. “Do I look like a damn highblood to you?”

“Huh.” said the man, a little taken aback. “What do you have on you?”

“Two regular-ass sickles, and I think maybe a couple of quarter-caegars in one of my pockets, and you’re welcome to them.”

There was a jangle as the man fished in Karkat’s pocket for the coins, then took an appraising look at his sickles and apparently decided that they weren’t worth taking.

“Honestly, talk about a low-rent crime.” Karkat said, irritation overtaking common sense. “You ambush a school kid for a basic mugging and you don’t even kill him. An expert like you ought to be embarrassed.” 

Karkat suddenly remembered that scolding a guy who was holding a knife in your ribcage was a bad idea and shut up, but the man just chuckled and withdrew the blade.

“Yeah, but I was bored.” he said. “I’ll do something to pick my rep back up later.”

Karkat sighed in relief and clapped a hand over his wound. Now that Kanaya had shown him how to sew, he could just duck into an alley and stitch it up real quick. He would have to remember to thank her later. Now if he could just slip away before anyone saw him...

“Spades Slick!” someone down the street thundered. Karkat and the half-orc(who was named Slick, apparently) turned to see a dragonborn Legislacerator pointing a sword-cane. “You are guilty of numerous counts of murder, assault, robbery, grand larceny, smuggling, and treason! Surrender and die!”

“Shouldn’t that be ‘surrender or die’?” Karkat mused.

“In Alternia?” Slick snarked.

“Good point.”

The Legislacerator’s eyes roamed over the two of them- and lingered for a moment on the blood oozing through the Karkat’s fingers as he held them over his wound. Fuck fuck fuck. The dragonborn drew his two blades from the cane and started walking purposefully towards the two of them.

“Well, it’s been fun, kid.” said Slick. “See ya!” 

He turned and bolted down the street, and was rather surprised to see Karkat running after him.

“If you think you’re gonna help catch me, you’re dead wrong!” Slick snapped, raising a knife.

“You’re not the only one who needs to get away from that Legislacerator.” Karkat responded. “Please tell me you’ve got an escape plan.”

“Yeah, sure. Right in this alley-,” Slick turned sharply and Karkat followed.

“-where there used to be a hole in the wall.” said Slick, looking at a section of brand-new brickwork. “Shit.”

“Die!” yelled the Legislacerator, who had caught up with them. He lunged at Slick, swords flashing; Slick drew a second knife and the two of them started going at it in a dizzying display of bladesmanship. Karkat started trying to sneak unobtrusively towards the mouth of the alley.

“Don’t think you can get away, mutant!” snapped the Legislacerator in between parries. “Even if you slip away now, I’ll have people patrol the combat schools for you!”

“I never did anything wrong!” Karkat protested.

“The law is the law, mutant.” said the Legislacerator, turning his attention back to trying to slip a blade past Slick’s wild flailing of knives.

Karkat stood stunned for a moment. The guy was right; if he set people looking specifically for Karkat, he wouldn’t last long, and Kanaya and possibly some other good people might go down trying to help him. But it was stupid! He had never done anything against Alternia! Okay, technically, some of the tricks they did to keep the orphanage collective going were illegal, but they didn’t actually hurt anyone, and it helped keep a whole bunch of people alive. He was even learning to be a soldier! But none of that mattered; he was a mutant, so he would get hunted down like a dog.

Rage boiled up in him. It wasn’t fair! He deserved a chance!

And if he was going to die like a dog in the end, then he was at least going to bite first.

“You know what, fuck you!” he screamed, and lunged at the Legislacerator, a sickle arcing for his head. Fast as thought, the dragonborn whirled on him, sweeping the blow aside with one blade while his other arm came around and cracked Karkat under the chin with a sword hilt. Karkat fell backwards onto the ground, and the Legislacerator drew back his arm for a killing stab that Karkat would be far too slow to deflect.

And then the Legislacerator realized that he shouldn’t have taken his eyes off of the dangerous knife-wielding criminal, just as Slick finished carving a bloody path from his left kidney to his carotid artery.

The dragonborn staggered for a moment, before Slick stabbed him in the spine for good measure and let him topple over. The alley was silent for a moment as Slick and Karkat caught their breath.

“Heh.” Slick grinned. “Nice flank, kid.”

Slick started digging through the dead man’s pockets for valuables. He found a coin purse in short order, poured half of it into his own pockets, and then tossed the rest to Karkat, who just barely managed to catch it.

“What’s this for?” Karkat asked.

“You helped kill him, so you get half.” said Slick. “Fair’s fair. You want one of the swords, too?”

“No, I’d rather not have to explain where I got it.” said Karkat.

“Good point. I’ll just take both, then.” Slick picked them up, then made a face like he had just bitten into some bad meat. “Ugh. Feels like shit. Must be axiomatic blades. Oh, well, I can just pawn ‘em or something.”

“You don’t care about, you know?” Karkat gestured to the mutant blood still dripping a bit from where Slick had stabbed him earlier.

Slick rolled his eyes. “Ratting people out to the government is a bitch move. Besides,” he added, cutting a line across his palm and holding it up for emphasis, “we all bleed red in the end. Even those damn seadwellers just have a screwy-looking shade of it.”

“Oh. Alright then.” 

Karkat took a minute to stitch up his wound, while Slick finished looting the dead Legislacerator. Karkat looked over the body once Slick was finished. Now that he had a second to process things, the dead man looked familiar.

“Is that Sennac Sollon?” Karkat asked shakily.

“Well, it was.” said Slick. “Stupid fucker thought that just because he was the top Legislacerator in the city he could come after me alone, even though he was getting a bit old and his paladin powers haven’t worked in years.”

“Oh.” said Karkat. “I guess we’re both going to be public enemy number one, now, huh?”

“Well, I already was.” said Slick. “But I don’t think anyone actually saw you come in here with me, so you should be good.” He grinned nastily. “Unless you want me to make sure you get your full share of the credit?”

“No, no, I’m good, the credit’s all yours.” Karkat said hastily.

“Alright then. I killed him alone, with no help from anyone else who might want to get out of being prosecuted.” Slick grinned again. “Nice to meet you, uh?”

“Karkat.” 

“Karkat, right. See you around.”

“Hey, wait!” said Karkat, who had just remembered something. Slick turned back to look at him. “Your list of crimes had smuggling on it, right? So you can help people get a hold of contraband under the table, right?”

“If by that you mean selling them illegal stuff, then yeah. Why?”

Karkat smiled. Maybe it was his lucky day.

“I represent, uh, a group of people who could use your services. Can you do restricted medical supplies?”

“How much are we talking?” Slick asked.

Karkat quickly took an accounting of the collective’s budget in his head. “Six hundred caegars worth, for starters, and probably more stuff in the future.”

Slick thought about it for a second, then reached in his pocket and handed Karkat a slip of paper. 

“Can’t be harder than some of the other stuff we do. Come to this address at sunset tomorrow. Don’t bother bringing the payment with you, you’ll probably just get mugged. See you then, kid.”

\----------------

The next day at sunset, Karkat made his way carefully to the address Slick had given him. Slick hadn’t asked him to come alone, and Skylla had offered to tag along, but Karkat was by himself anyway, just in case Slick might have objected to anyone else knowing the location of his hideout. Said hideout was in a solidly middle-class neighborhood, surprisingly. That probably explained why the Legislacerators were having so much trouble catching the guy; they always looked in the slums. It also meant that Karkat had to be very careful with how he acted while walking through the neighborhood in order to avoid suspicion, but he was used to that.

After double checking to make sure he had the right address, Karkat knocked quietly on the door and stepped inside, where he was immediately pinned to the wall by a tall half-elf man with a quarterstaff.

“And just who the hell are you?” the man snarled.

Before Karkat could answer, Slick’s voice rang out from further inside. “Droog! Stop menacing the client!”

“Maybe let me know that we’re getting a client next time!” Droog yelled back, before turning to Karkat, his voice suddenly more mellifluous. “Apologies, right this way.”

Karkat was ushered inside, where Slick and the other two members of his gang were gathered around a cart full of boxes.

“Hey, kid.” said Slick. “I see you already met Droog. This here is Boxcars and Deuce.”

Boxcars was a hulking half-ogre with an axe slung over his back. Deuce was a twitchy little kobold fiddling with an alchemy set. All four of them wore the same sort of neat dark clothing, and all four of them had some pretty nice hats. 

“We’re the Midnight Crew.” Slick continued. “Gang, this is Karkat, the guy who’s picking up all of these illegal medical supplies.”

“Would it have killed you to explain that earlier?” said Droog. “Instead of just saying that we needed to go steal a bunch of illegal medical supplies without telling us why?”

“Ah, quit your whining.” Slick shot back. “Anyway, the goods are in the cart if you want to take a look.”

Karkat looked them over. Potions, salves, panaceas, everything they needed. Enough to save everyone in the collective who was sick. It was actually quite a bit, considering that they were only paying six hundred caegars, but Karkat wasn’t about to say that out loud.

“You were thinking that it’s a lot for what you’re paying, weren’t you?” said Droog. 

“Yeah.” Karkat admitted.

“Other gangs and black market operators overcharge because they’re scared of the law and they’ve got a bunch of unnecessary people to pay.” Droog explained. “We haven’t got those problems.”

“Plus, Deuce made a fair bit of this stuff himself, so that helps.” Slick added.

Karkat glanced skeptically at the little kobold, who was currently stirring a vial of glowing green liquid with a dirty fork.

“Yeah, I know,” said Slick, “but he’s actually a pretty decent alchemist. We’ve been using his stuff ourselves for years, and we’ve never had any problems.”

“Well, it’s probably fine then.” said Karkat. It wasn’t like he was in a position to be picky, anyway.

“Great.” said Slick. “Let’s get this delivery done.”

The five of them left and started making their way warily back to the slums. They were almost there when they were accosted by a trio of guards.

“Say, brat,” said one of them. “Is this a legitimate delivery?”

“Um, yeah.” said Karkat.

“You sure? Because if it is, you ought to have some paperwork for it, and if you don’t, we might require some convincing to let you and your freak squad by.” The guard rubbed his fingers together meaningfully, and Karkat sighed. Of all the times to get shaken down for bribes.

“Hey, it’s no trouble.” said Droog, stepping up to the guard. “I’ve got some authorization.”

“Oh, really? Where?”

“Right here.” Droog’s quarterstaff flicked up and smashed the guard’s teeth in. Before his companions could do anything, Slick had stabbed one of them in the heart, and Boxcars had bitten out the other’s throat. Droog put the first guard out of his misery with a crack to the head, and Deuce whipped out a vial of bubbling yellow liquid and made to throw it at the bodies before Slick caught his arm.

“Loot ‘em first, dumbass.”

“Oh, right.” said Deuce, putting away the vial and starting to pick over the corpses.

“‘Right here’.” Slick chuckled. “Good one, Droog.”

Karkat shook his head wonderingly. Three guards dead before they could shout a warning or draw a sword. The Midnight Crew did not mess around.

“Do you think anyone saw us?” Karkat asked nervously. There didn’t seem to be anyone else nearby, and it was dark, but the city never truly slept.

“Eh, maybe, but you’d be surprised at how few people are inclined to be witnesses for this sort of thing.” said Droog.

Deuce finished looting the bodies and threw the glowing liquid over them; it smoked and hissed and quickly reduced the corpses to ash that scattered in the breeze. Talk about quick problem-solving.

“And that takes care of that.” said Slick. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

They made it to the orphanage with no further incident and unloaded the goods. Kanaya immediately started sorting them out and rushing them to where they were needed in the infirmary. Other kids started chattering excitedly as they realized what Karkat had brought back, and happy laughter and relieved tears started to fill the room.

Skylla grabbed the sackful of money and handed it over to Slick, who took a cursory look inside before foisting the heavy bag off on Boxcars.

“Pleasure doing business with you, kid.” said Slick. “If you ever need anything else, you know where to find us.”

“That I do.” Karkat agreed. “See you around, Slick.”

The Midnight Crew slipped back into the darkened streets, while Karkat went to go help Kanaya in the infirmary, spirits buoyed by the fact that he had managed to do something unequivocally right for once.

\---------------

Their orphanage collective quickly found itself getting into a mutually beneficial relationship with the Midnight Crew; it turned out that there were lots of ways a well-organized group of unsupervised kids and a band of violent criminals could help each other out. 

The kids who ran the illegal fishing operations on the river had picked up a comprehensive knowledge of the patrols and tactics of the Alternian riverine police, and their updates proved to be very useful for the Midnight Crew’s smuggling operations. Other kids provided less thorough but still valuable intel about the rest of the city. Some of the more courageous kids even volunteered to be spotters and lookouts for various crimes, and Skylla had helped the gang break into a few offices and beat the crap out of a few people in gang fights over turf in the herding districts. Marsti volunteered to clean up the gang’s crime scenes while she was working at a cleaning service, conveniently erasing important evidence in the process. The collective forgery knowledge of Droog, Karkat (who had picked some things up over the years of faking requisitions forms), and all of the kids who Karkat had started training in the basics combined to create a thriving business in fake paperwork. Chixie Roixmr, a girl who was a leading figure in newly-joined Orphanage I and also had a spectacular singing voice, had gotten some gigs arranged by the Midnight Crew in nightclubs that were sleazy but didn’t try to sell talented performers into slavery after they were done, which was a rarity in Alternia.

And on the other hand, the Midnight Crew happily accepted all of the above as payment in kind for everything from restricted medical supplies to arms and armor to the occasional hit on a particularly annoying gang of slavers or the like. They really were an alright bunch, once you got past how they could murder people for looking at them wrong.

Karkat was honestly pretty content with how things were going, even if he was pretty busy. After all, their collective was keeping a whole lot of people who would have otherwise been in serious trouble safe and fed. Okay, maybe he still wasn’t getting as much sleep as he ought to, but that was fine. Arranging supply distribution, construction schedules, monster hunts and patrols, and various food-gathering initiatives was honestly kind of habitual at this point. So was helping with security and helping Kanaya in the infirmary. He was used to the rigors of combat school by now, and he was pretty sure he was actually getting stronger from it, which was nice. Of course, he was still hard-pressed to fight monsters that the older, richer academy kids could slice up pretty well at this point, so apparently he still needed to practice more.

Which was why, as he hung around the Midnight Crew’s hideout waiting for someone to show up so he could deliver a report on the Coast Guard’s new patrol patterns, he was hacking away at some of the training dummies the crew had lying around. No sense wasting any time, considering all the things he had to do when he got back home. He had to meet with the head gardeners to decide what kinds of seeds they should try to get ahold of, discuss a suggestion to try and clear a safe tunnel system between buildings, yell at some people on Marsti’s behalf about how to keep termites cleaned out of the woodwork, and probably some other stuff he was forgetting about.

There was a crash as the door to the hideout slammed open, and Slick came in, scratched up and trailing blood.

“Hey, Slick.” Karkat called as he tried out a combo on one of the dummies. “I’ve got some reports for you.”

“Great, that’s- what the hell are you doing?”

“Oh, sorry.” Karkat winced. “Didn’t realize you didn’t want people using these.”

“No, I mean what the hell are you doing with those sickles?” said Slick, shaking his head.

“Huh?”

“You’re swinging them around like they’re handaxes! Honestly, what do they even teach you at that fancy combat school?”

“Lots of spear and shield drills, lots of exercise and discipline, a whole bunch about obeying orders and spotting traitors, that sort of thing.” said Karkat. “Why, what am I doing wrong?”

“You’re just hacking away with them, but that’s not what they’re built for. Here, give me one of those.”

Karkat handed one of his sickles to Slick, who swung it around experimentally before continuing.

“The point of the hook shape is to trap enemy weapons.” Slick reached out and hooked Karkat’s remaining sickle and pulled it aside. “The reason you have two is so that once you use one to get the other guy’s weapon out of the way, you can use the other one to hit ‘em.” Slick emphasized his point by swiping his empty hand near Karkat in a way that would have ripped out a lung if an actual weapon had been involved.

“You can hook the rim of a shield like that too.” Slick added. “But when you get in an actual hit, don’t chop like it’s a handaxe. The shape is all wrong for that. You use the point to hook and tear like a claw, that’s why it’s fucking claw-shaped.” Slick demonstrated on one of the training dummies, leaving a very satisfying rip all the way down it.

“Only chop if you can get it around a limb.” Slick concluded, handing the sickle back to Karkat. “Go on, give it a shot.”

Karkat attacked the training dummies again, this time keeping Slick’s advice in mind. It went a lot smoother, he had to say. He was doing more damage, and he could tell that his strikes were landing better. 

He finished up his routine and turned back to Slick.

“Thanks for the advice.” he said. “How do you know all that? I don’t usually see you with sickles.”

Slick shrugged. “What can I say? I know my blades.”

“I guess you do.” Slick was certainly good at slicing people to ribbons, Karkat had noticed. “Anyway, here’s those reports on the new patrol patterns.”

“Great..” Slick reached out and took the paper from Karkat, wincing as he did so. Karkat suddenly realized that Slick seemed rather injured; he had been distracted by Slick’s impromptu sickle lesson. Stupid!

“Are you alright?” Karkat asked.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just had a run-in with Snowman.” Slick grinned wolfishly.

Karkat sighed. Snowman (there was no way that was her real name but it was the only one anybody knew) was a special agent working for Alternia who dealt with high-level criminals and dissidents. She and Slick had what mostly seemed like a classic sort of slap-kiss-slap rivalmance going on, except instead of slaps they tried to cut each other to rags. The lady was a deft hand with a whip, which meant she usually got the better of Slick by virtue of superior range, and apparently today was no exception.

“Are those wounds going to be okay?” Karkat asked.

“Yeah, I just need to wait until Deuce finishes his new batch of healing potions tomorrow.” Slick gritted his teeth as his dismissive hand wave pulled at something. “Or maybe he’s doing them the day after, I forget. I’ve had worse.”

“You want me to stitch those up?” Karkat asked after a second.

“They’re not that bad.” Slick growled.

“Oh, for sure.” Karkat agreed. “But you don’t want to bleed on the suits, do you?” 

Slick thought about that for a second before looking just a little relieved. “Good point, stitch me up.”

Karkat pulled out the needle and thread he carried everywhere just in case and carefully lined it up with the largest cut.

“This is going to hurt.” he warned Slick.

“Aw, how bad could it- yeow!”

“Told you.”

Karkat worked quickly; he still wasn’t as good as Kanaya, but he had been getting a fair bit of practice.

“Where’d you learn to do that?” Slick asked after he was finished.

“A friend taught me.”

“Nice.” Slick looked over the stitches. “Thanks, kid.”

“No problem. If you ever need more, I’m happy to help.” That was everything Karkat needed to do here. “See you next time, Slick.” He turned to walk out the door.

“Hey, wait.” said Slick. “If you ever want a few more pointers on how to swing a blade, come by anytime.”

“Really?” Karkat asked.

Slick nodded. “You’re pretty alright in my book, and our best client too. I’d hate for you to get killed just because that combat school can’t teach you shit.”

Karkat thought for a moment. “I think I’ll take you up on that sometime, actually. See you later.”

\----------------

Life went on, and Karkat kept being busy. Their collective kept getting bigger and bigger, as word got around among the kids in the street that there was a place you could go where you got properly fed and you could sleep safely at night. Meanwhile, the Condesce (or actually one of her ministers, probably) had noticed that cutting funding for the orphanage system hadn’t resulted in any particular catastrophe, and had responded by cutting more funding. The collective had added a sixth building, Orphanage Aleph, and disbanded a seventh orphanage due to it being in an inconvenient location. Karkat had arranged for the kids to be evacuated in convoys, and forged some extra requisition forms to get the materials to build expansions on the remaining buildings to house them all. There were more kids who were getting old enough for proper jobs and getting some construction experience, which helped with their projects.

The collective’s security patrols were starting to verge on being an actual paramilitary; they even had a small group of kids, Karkat included, who were strong enough to actively hunt monsters like they were low-rent adventurers or something. Karkat even had a magic sickle; Slick had won it in a card game and passed it on to Karkat after a training session one day, claiming that sickles weren’t his style. Fortunately, no one in authority seemed to notice the arms gathering, since they didn’t try to fight the government or do any serious criminal activity. Thanks to the Midnight Crew, they had plenty of medical supplies and so on too. All in all, life nowadays was actually fairly safe for most kids, to a degree that would have seemed like a pipe dream back when the first bunch of them had been forced to start fending for themselves. It had really sunk in for Karkat when he had been taking a food inventory and realized that they had a surplus for the tenth time in a row. They were safer too; Karkat and everyone else could usually show up pretty quickly when something dangerous threatened; no need to wait for anyone else to save them.

Sure, everyone had to work hard for it, but unlike most everyone else in Alternia who worked hard they were actually getting something for it. And when he was at home with a bunch of kids who could relax and talk freely among each other (though Karkat still didn’t dare reveal his mutation) it was almost enough to make him forget about the brutality of life outside.

Of course, life had a way of reminding him about the brutality. For example, sometimes he would come home and there would be another kid getting dragged off by another damn barghest because the things kept digging up more damned holes to crawl out of.

“Barghest!” Karkat yelled; it was a familiar enough cry by now. The human kid getting dragged off seemed unusually subdued; hopefully that meant that the beast had used up some of its magical abilities getting him that way.

As the clatter of kids grabbing weapons and rushing for the door echoed from inside the orphanage, Karkat lunged to pull the kid away, slashing through his shirt where the barghest had caught it and tossing him a few feet back. Unfortunately, this meant that the monster’s attention was turned to Karkat, and the two of them wound up tumbling down into the hole together.

(Underneath all the panic and adrenaline, some part of Karkat’s mind sighed in exasperation. This sort of fight was getting annoyingly familiar.)

Karkat and the barghest hit the floor in a tangle. Time to try and not get mauled while flailing ineffectively at it until someone showed up to help. A sickle scraped uselessly off the monster’s neck; Karkat narrowly avoided a bite at his throat, then tried again with the other sickle-

-which tore a massive gash in the barghest’s side with ease. Wait, what?

The monster yelped with pain and jumped back a little, and Karkat moved to follow, striking with both of his weapons. His older sickle was as useless as usual, but the newer magic one he had gotten from Slick carved the barghest’s flesh as easily as anything else. Well, Karkat wasn’t about to let the fact go to waste; he rushed in, using his older sickle to fend off blows while hacking away with the magic one. The wounds it left seemed to bleed more than they should have, too; Karkat was outright soaked. The barghest kept backing away; it was weakening, and it had either already used up its vanishing trick for the day or was too panicked to remember it. The creature landed a few strikes on Karkat in the melee, leaving cuts on his arms and a shallow gash in his side, but Karkat was winning, and the barghest’s wounds just wouldn’t stop bleeding.

Eventually, after what felt like fifteen minutes but was definitely a lot shorter, the barghest slumped to the ground in a pool of its own blood, and Karkat cut its head off just to be sure, before slumping up against the wall as the adrenaline wore off.

Kanaya picked that moment to make her entrance, jumping into the hole with her sword at the ready. She saw the dead barghest and Karkat sitting down covered in blood, and blinked, taken aback.

“Hey.” said Karkat, tiredly.

Kanaya rushed over and knelt next to him, looking him over. After a moment, she relaxed.

“I’m glad to see that such a small proportion of this blood is actually yours.” she said.

“Yeah, the thing really gushes when you start cutting into it, apparently.” said Karkat.

“I don’t envy your laundry day.” Kanaya said, grinning wryly as she pulled out some spare scraps of cloth to cover up any trace of mutant blood.

“Don’t remind me.” Karkat groaned and dropped his head into his hands.

Some of the other kids had made their way down and were standing around chattering excitedly, glancing in between Karkat and the dead barghest. It almost reminded him of the way people had used to chatter about the Threshecutioners when they dispatched some particularly dangerous monster.

“What are they so excited about?” Karkat asked.

“Well, you did manage to kill one of the barghests that have been causing so much trouble around here.” said Kanaya. “By yourself, even, unless there was some sort of passing hero that I missed.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess I did.” Karkat shrugged and lifted up the magic sickle. “I’ll have to remember to thank Slick.”

Skylla and Lady came rushing in.

“Alright, what’s all the hubbub.” Skylla asked, before taking in the scene.

“Nice!” She reached down to give Karkat a fistbump. “There’s a bounty for these things, right?”

“Yeah.” said Karkat. “Give me a minute and I’ll go haul it over to the bounty office.”

“Nah, I’ve got it.” said Skylla, easily throwing the carcass over one shoulder. “You look beat. Go get cleaned up, I reckon you earned it.”

Karkat sighed and let Kanaya pull him to his feet, then slipped through the crowd. He would have liked to get cleaned up and go to bed, but somebody still had to finish the month’s accounting, and settle the argument between Orphanages I and Prime over who should get roof repairs first, and that somebody was Karkat.

He made it to bed eventually, and snatched a few hours of sleep before heading off to combat school again in the morning. His clothes still didn’t look quite right, despite his best efforts to get the blood out, but they were within acceptable standards for cleanliness. (The school could be surprisingly generous on that front as long as all the insignias were fine and it was still instantly recognizable as a uniform. Small favors, but probably necessary ones considering the lot of most of the non-high caste students.) His wounds hadn’t been that bad and weren’t particularly bothering him; he would just have to be a little careful, which was hardly new.

The same three elf kids who he had alerted about a barghest once a long time ago were walking by; they frequently crossed paths with Karkat on their way to school. One of them seemed to notice something off about Karkat’s uniform, and elbowed his friends, snickering.

“You look like you had some problems, Sickles! What’s the matter, run into a barghest again or something?”

Karkat nearly snapped back that as a matter of fact, he had, before thinking better of it.

“Just a spill.” he said instead; those three didn’t like it if you just ignored them and walked on.

“You oughta be more careful, Sickles. You wouldn’t want to get in trouble or anything, would you?”

“No.” Karkat said dutifully.

The three kids walked on, still snickering. Karkat sighed and trudged on behind them. It really stung that those guys were all so much better at fighting than him.

Wait.

Karkat had always assumed that they were better fighters than him, since they had so easily hacked into that barghest back then, and tended to do a lot better in combat practice and such. But now that Karkat had a magic weapon, he had actually managed to kill a barghest. And those three elf kids were on the rich side, which meant that they got a lot better gear, and had more free time to practice, and probably got to sleep a lot better, and maybe even had tutors, and so on. And so the question Karkat suddenly found himself asking was:

Were they actually better, or just _richer_?

And with that question ringing in his mind, Karkat walked on, determined to really get down to learn how to fight.

\---------------

It was a nice night, there was a (admittedly kind of subdued) party going on below him, and Karkat was sitting up on the orphanage roof behind a chimney doing tax paperwork. That probably made him about the least interesting fifteen year-old in the world. Though now that he thought about it, he was actually doing tax _fraud_ , so maybe that countered it a bit. And it wasn’t like he was just avoiding people; he had told Droog he would get the fake tax documents for their money laundering scheme ready by tomorrow, and so here he was, away from any distractions.

The sort-of party below was a fairly simple affair, though everyone had done their best to make it as festive as possible with their limited resources. The occasion was that Skylla was leaving; she had turned eighteen, the age where Alternia drafted people into more important jobs, and she had gotten a gig helping to run cattle herds out from the hinterlands into various Alternian trading ports. It was actually a pretty good job, out in the country with less strict government supervision, and well suited to Skylla’s skills and temperament. It also meant that she would rarely (if ever) get back to the capital after she left in the morning, and odds were good that none of them would ever see her again. 

Skylla was the oldest person in the collective, had been there since the beginning, and had been one of the most important people who helped keep them safe during the early years; she would be dearly missed. But it couldn’t be helped, and you certainly couldn’t say that Skylla didn’t deserve to have a nicer life. Still, Karkat was going to miss having her around. 

Not that she would be able to tell, since he was up on the roof instead of at the party saying goodbye. But he would catch up with her later, when there wasn’t such a crowd. There was no shortage of people seeing her off, and a lot of people had scrounged up assorted little gifts to give her. Kanaya had made her a jacket and several blankets, Marsti had given her a knife, other kids had made little cards and tokens and so on, and Slick had even dropped by to reminisce about a few criminal escapades and give her a nice bottle of whiskey and a bloodstained pair of magic gloves he had looted. Karkat was not nearly as good with textiles as Kanaya yet, despite getting some practice in his fleeting snatches of spare time, so he had settled for making a scarf. He had also tried to get her to take a little bit of money (they could spare a little bit, these days), but she had insisted she couldn’t. Karkat had hidden it in her bag anyway before coming up on the roof.

No more distractions. He really needed to finish that paperwork.

Karkat got down to business, writing up a convincing-looking certification for Droog’s fake charity, which Alternian tax assessors would be eager to accept because it was filed as a class A-3 organization, allowing them to collect minor discretionary payments from it to contribute to their own office’s salary budget. The assessors would be eager enough to engage in graft that they would overlook minor issues like the nonexistent address and nonspecific records of where the money was going. The only way the scheme could fall apart would be if an honest civil servant took over the assessor’s office, and that was about as likely as being hit by a meteor while walking down the street. Karkat had actually suggested the scheme to help launder the Midnight Crew’s money, since it was actually cheaper and less risky than just bribing people like the gang usually did.

After forging the last few signatures, Karkat sighed and looked up at the stars. He had heard that you could see a lot more stars out away from the city, but he still liked to see the few bright pinpricks that were visible through the glow of the city’s lights. Just a few minutes of relaxing, and then he would head back downstairs.

There was a jingle as a little bag of money landed in his lap.

“Nice try, Karkat.” said Skylla, sitting down next to him. “But I appreciate the thought.”

Karkat shook his head. “No getting things past you, huh?”

“Nah, I just figured you wouldn’t give up on trying to foist it on me.” Skylla grinned.

“Right.” said Karkat. “You know, the party’s downstairs.”

“Yeah, but I wanted to talk to you.” said Skylla. “Figured you’d be away from everyone else doing some work.”

“You figured right.” said Karkat, gathering up his papers. “What did you want to talk about?”

Skylla paused for a moment.

“Are you sure you guys are going to be alright after I’m gone?”

“Yes.” said Karkat. “I won’t say we’re not going to feel your absence, especially when we have to drive away monsters, but there’s lots of us now, and we’re pretty well organized. We’ll be fine.”

“That’s a relief.” Skylla relaxed. “But I still can’t help but feel kind of bad about leaving you all here while I go off to play ranger.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re not playing ranger, you’re going to actually be a ranger.”

Skylla smiled. “Thanks, Karkat.”

They sat in silence for a moment.

“You know, I should be thanking you.” said Karkat. He gestured at the building in general, and all of the kids who were safe and having a pretty alright time. “We couldn’t have done this without you.”

“I dunno. You were the one who got all this started.”

“We’d have never made it through the early days without you and Lady helping protect us.” said Karkat.

“Maybe.” Skylla conceded. “But we’d have never gotten anywhere if you hadn’t yelled us into shape after we got left on our own. If you hadn’t done that, we’d have all been out roaming the streets. I might not even be alive today.”

Karkat wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.

“I just did what I felt like I needed to.” he finally said.

“Yeah, and am I ever glad you did.” Skylla sighed. “I’m gonna miss having you around when I’m out in the sticks.”

“Really?” Karkat raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think I’d be much use out there.”

“Hey, don’t go selling yourself short either.” said Skylla. “Whenever anything needs to get organized, you’re a great guy to have around.”

“I’m sure that would be real helpful when the direwolves come running out of the woods, wouldn’t it?” Karkat said.

“There’s more to keeping people safe than fighting, you know.”

Karkat made a noncommittal noise.

Skylla shook her head. “You’re not giving yourself enough credit.”

“If you say so.” said Karkat, unconvinced.

Skylla shook her head. “Anyway. What I wanted to make sure I caught up with you to say before I left was this. These last few years with the collective have been so much better than I had ever imagined that my life could be. Thanks for making it happen.”

“You had a lot to do with it too. But you’re welcome.”

Skylla smiled at him, then stood up and stretched.

“Coming inside?” she asked. “It looks like you’re done with the paperwork.”

“In a minute.”

Skylla left, and Karkat sat alone with his thoughts for a second. He wasn’t sure why Skylla felt the need to thank him like that. He had just been doing what had to be done. Someone else could probably have stepped up if they had to, maybe even done a better job. But hey, at least he had apparently managed to be of some help. With that thought cheering him up, Karkat got up and went back down to join the party.

\--------------------

Karkat looked himself over carefully in the shiny pot hanging in the kitchen that was the closest thing they had to a mirror. Today was important, and he had to look good. 

“There’s a speck of lint on your left shoulder blade.” said Marsti, who was sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast.

“Thanks.”

Karkat awkwardly reached around to flick it off. That probably covered everything, then. Karkat steadied himself and set off for the academy.

Today was important because it was the day when the academy’s class would be divided by the instructors into two groups: the standard students, who would be inducted into the standard infantry when their training was complete, and the skilled-tier students, who would have the chance to join one of the Alternian military’s special units instead. 

He was hoping to get into the skilled-tier, of course. He thought he might have a chance, even. After all, he had been doing pretty well, especially since he had been getting lessons from Slick and getting practice in on the various monsters that they had to fight. He could do all the drills perfectly. In the sparring matches he hadn’t been quite so successful, since he always had to be careful not to get cut, which meant he never volunteered to have a match and consequently very rarely had to have one. Not to mention that showing up a higher-caste kid in front of everyone was a good way to get a knife in your back.

But still, he was doing pretty damn well for a slum kid, if you asked him. He still had some hope.

The day passed in a blur until the end, as the instructors finished observing and posted the lists of who was in what class. Karkat resisted the urge to scramble forward to see the lists and hung back until the crowd thinned, then went up and took a look.

He wasn’t on the skilled-tier list. Actually, not a lot of people were. Actually, now that he looked at it again, the instructors seemed to have put all the higher-caste kids on the skilled-tier list and everyone else into standard without really looking at them very hard at all.

Now that Karkat thought about it, that was probably about the least surprising thing that he had ever seen. Still, it was a little disappointing.

Karkat left for home, musing. He had still sort of entertained some slight dream of being a Threshecutioner. He still remembered how they had so casually gotten rid of monsters that drove everyone else to screaming terror, without hesitating. He had loved that- still did, actually. To help keep people safe without being afraid. But there was nothing he could do about it. At least this way he could just focus on helping out the collective.

Karkat walked down the street, keeping an eye out. It was a standard enough scene; vendors, beggars, urchins, a mugger who was looking intently at Karkat until he noticed Karkat noticing him and slipped away; the usual. Hang on, that was one of the collective’s younger kids, backed against a wall by a recruiter from that sleazy maidservant hiring group that was probably a front for a slave ring. Karkat walked briskly over, sickle in hand.

“I’m not interested!” the girl was insisting.

“Aw, come on,” the recruiter was saying. “The pay is great, and-” He abruptly stopped as the point of a sickle came to rest a hairsbreadth from his jugular.

“She said she wasn’t interested.” Karkat said.

“Hey, what’s it to you-” the man turned, saw Karkat’s uniform, and swallowed nervously, “-um, sir?”

“Get out of here.” Karkat pointed down the street, and the man scrambled away.

“Thanks.” said the girl.

“Don’t mention it. Are you on your way home?”

“Yep.” The girl beamed, much happier now that the sleazebag was gone.

“Me too. Let’s stick together, alright? You should have someone with you when you have to go out.”

As they walked the last few blocks, Karkat made a mental note to see when Slick was free to go pay an unfriendly visit to the probably-a-slave-ring’s headquarters. They might not be able to do anything about the government oppressing them, but anyone else who tried to mess with the collective these days without government backing was in for a sharp lesson. It was nice; definitely a change for the better from the old days.

They got home. Kanaya was sitting in a warm patch of sun in the front room, sewing up a torn jacket.

“Did you get picked for the more skilled classes?” she asked him.

“No.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” Kanaya shook her head. “I would have thought you would be well-suited for them.”

“It was always kind of a longshot. They only like their damn highbloods, after all.” Karkat shrugged. “Just gives me more time to help out with things around here.”

“I suppose.” Kanaya reached into her pocket. “That reminds me, the report about the potential structural problems in Orphanage Alpha that you asked for came in.”

She handed Karkat a folded scrap of paper.

“Thanks, I’ll look over it. Any sewing projects I can help with while I read?”

Kanaya reached into a pile and tossed him a shirt with the sleeves half hanging off, and he set off upstairs to his little side room, sat down at his makeshift desk (two broken boards laid over some buckets with holes in them), and sighed. It would have been nice to be chosen for something more important. Oh, well.

Karkat pulled out a needle and thread, unfolded the report, and got back to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Relevant Pathfinder mechanic- Barghests have DR 5/magic, and the sickle Slick gave Karkat is a +2 Wounding. (If Karkat had any idea how much it was worth he would have an aneurysm, lol.) Thanks for reading, see you next time. EDIT: I don't know why the hell it insists on putting the chapter 1 endnote after this one. Does anyone know how to make it not do that?

**Author's Note:**

> Well, that's that. Coming up next, military school, more monster fights, stab-uncles, and the rest of the Beta gang.
> 
> Also, those monsters that the Threshies fight are urhags, in case you were curious  
> https://aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Urhag


End file.
